Amis, McEwan and Rushdie Properly Celebrate the Not-So-Proper Modern British Novel

Martin Amis, left, and Ian McEwan at the 92nd Street Y, where they appeared with Salman Rushdie for a discussion and reading of their fiction.Credit
Nancy Crampton

On Monday, as corks were still popping across London in celebration of the new royal baby, a sellout crowd gathered at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for a different celebration of Englishness.

The occasion was a rare joint appearance by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, the literary equivalent of a concert by the Three Tenors — or perhaps a friendlier version of the Yalta conference, with three longtime allies jostling to carve up whatever territory might still be controlled by big-dude British literary novelists of a certain age.

Since the 1970s, this triumvirate has been accused of “dominating and distorting British fiction,” Mr. Rushdie boasted, after strolling onstage in a casually clubbable blue blazer, khakis and clean white tennis shoes. “But unfortunately,” he added, “since Martin and I have established our beachheads in New York — so look out, America! — Ian has to look after England on his own.”

The event itself — which featured readings from the most recent novels by Mr. Amis and Mr. McEwan, each introduced by Mr. Rushdie — could not be less English, Mr. Amis hastened to add when he took the stage.

In England, “if your favorite living writer, who also happened to be your long lost brother, was reading in the next house along, it would never even occur to you to go and stick your head round the door,” said Mr. Amis, who decamped to Brooklyn in 2011. Americans, by contrast, “come and listen to things.”

Those things, on Monday, included wry and often unprintable reminiscences about 1970s London literary life and the trio’s late and still-lamented friend Christopher Hitchens.

“I feel there should almost be an empty chair here,” Mr. Rushdie said, before going on to recall Mr. Hitchens’s fondness for word-substitution games. One of the more family-friendly ones: substitute “hysterical sex” for “love” in famous titles, as in “Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera.”

Forget roses, teakettles and Mum, a word Mr. Amis pronounced with particular nasal acidity. Instead, his selection from “Lionel Asbo: The State of England,” published last year, featured exploding fake breasts, a dinner with 48 gin and tonics, and a baby called Toilet, which is probably not on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s shortlist of names for their newborn son.

Mr. McEwan countered with a passage from “Sweet Tooth” (2012), set in seemingly bucolic Sussex, that took in blasphemy, adultery, stalking, a violent psychiatric episode, and “mutant genitalia” (female, of course) — all covered in less than 20 minutes.

The one-upmanship disguised as one-downmanship extended throughout the evening. Mr. Rushdie recalled Mr. Amis’s once saying that he was disappointed to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for “Time’s Arrow” (1991), thus “spoiling a perfect record” of having never being nominated.

But he was perhaps bested by Mr. McEwan, who declared to his two friends, “Even though the Atlantic Ocean lies between us, the hysterical sex between us is undying.”

Sex was also on the audience’s mind, judging by the questions submitted on notecards, starting with a query to Mr. McEwan about a 2008 talk in New York in which he recalled once propositioning a woman at a party in the bluntest Anglo-Saxon language possible.

“I never tried that again quite so directly,” Mr. McEwan said, as the crowd erupted. His subsequent methods, he added, have been “less frontal.”

Another person asked about the legacy of Mr. Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011.

Mr. McEwan recalled helping Mr. Hitchens out of bed in his last days to finish a 3,000-word essay about G. K. Chesterton, with facts and quotations pulled largely from memory.

The world will “never get that same combination of life and genes again,” Mr. McEwan said.

The final question from the audience — is there anything in your books that you wish you could change? — carried special poignancy in being read aloud by Mr. Rushdie, given the trouble caused by his “Satanic Verses.” But his two comrades took a pass on the chance for florid, and perhaps un-English, regrets.

Mr. Amis said he’d like another week with the complexities of the backward narrative of “Time’s Arrow,” but would leave “the mess of the first four novels” alone.

“You’ve just got to let it go,” he said. “Always be looking forward.”

Mr. McEwan admitted he’d like to kill some commas in his first story collection, “First Love, Last Rites” (1975).

“I fell under Beckett’s spell,” he recalled. “I thought it was jolly cunning to have commas and not full stops. But now it doesn’t look cunning at all.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2013, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Proper Celebration of the Not-So-Proper Modern British Novel. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe